Yale University Campus

Author's Comments

Yale rewards the slow walk. The Collegiate Gothic buildings were built in the 1920s to look centuries older, and the trick is convincing - the stone is deliberately weathered, the towers deliberately uneven, the courtyards arranged to feel as though they grew rather than were drawn. Knowing this does not diminish the effect. If anything it deepens it. I tend to enter through Phelps Gate in the afternoon, when the light is coming in low across the Old Campus and the stone has gone warm. Harkness Tower is the obvious subject and it is worth the obvious photograph, but I find the tower more interesting from inside the Branford College courtyard, where the scale compresses and you can frame it through arches and ivy and the geometry of leaded windows. Detail work pays here. The carved figures above doorways, the wear patterns on stone steps, the way late sun catches on slate roofs. Then there is the other Yale, the one most visitors walk past. The Beinecke is a marble box that glows from within at dusk, the translucent panels turning amber as the interior lights come up. Kahn's Art Gallery a few blocks south is quieter, more restrained, a study in concrete and shadow. The contrast between these buildings and the Gothic quadrangles is itself a subject worth photographing - one campus, two centuries of argument about what a university should look like. Autumn is the postcard season and it earns the cliche. But I have made some of my better Yale photographs in late winter, when the ivy is gone and the stonework reads cleanly against bare branches and gray sky. The architecture is honest in that light. Nothing is hiding.

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